


The Strange TRUE Case of the Closeted Doctor and the Kept Lover

by MiriamKenneath



Category: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: 21st Century, Conspiracy Theories, M/M, Newspaper article format, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-19 03:51:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19967581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiriamKenneath/pseuds/MiriamKenneath
Summary: THE GRAUNIAD Interview: Téa Roe on Dr Henry Jekyll – ‘Mr Hyde was not some “serum”-produced alternate personality of Dr Jekyll’s. He was Dr Jekyll’s secret male lover.’





	The Strange TRUE Case of the Closeted Doctor and the Kept Lover

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



T H E G R A U N I A D

**Interview**

Téa Roe on Dr Henry Jekyll – ‘Mr Hyde was not some “serum”-produced alternate personality of Dr Jekyll’s. He was Dr Jekyll’s secret male lover.’

Patricia Ackerson

27 July 2019

07.30 BST

Over 130 years after his unexplained disappearance and presumed death, Dr Henry Jekyll continues to make regular news. This time the news is the announcement that British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has rediscovered the correct formula for Jekyll’s famous (or infamous) “serum” and has already begun human clinical trials. The announcement follows closely on the heels of the Wellcome Collection’s blockbuster year-long _Dr Henry Jekyll: The Moral Mind Exhibition_ , which contributed to the largest annual attendance figures in the museum’s history.

Jekyll is, without a doubt, one of our most revered and widely-recognised historical figures, to the field of psychiatry what Charles Darwin is to biology and Alan Turing is to computer science, second in the world only to the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud for his lasting impact upon how we think about the human mind. So it is with no small amount of trepidation that I approached my scheduled interview with heterodox historian and bestselling author of _The Strange TRUE Case of the Closeted Homosexual and the Kept Lover_ Téa Roe.

“Do you need more light? Space to write?” asks Roe as she bustles around the cramped, close to windowless basement flat, switching on every available light fixture in a good-faith hostess’s attempt to accommodate a luddite journalist who still takes notes by hand. “I hope this isn’t too inconvenient for you. I know British people don’t like socialising or entertaining at home, but buying a cup of tea at the shop just seems so wasteful. And, well, after You Know Who went onto Twitter and called my book an assault on British national pride, I’ve been getting death threats the Met has informed me are credible. Needless to say, I’m not exactly terribly keen to be out in public when I don’t have to be.”

It’s a sorry sign of the times that one can receive credible death threats over the reputation of a man who hasn’t been alive since Queen Victoria reigned, yet here we are. Since her book was published a month ago, Roe has been living in the basement flat of a Georgian terrace somewhere in Islington belonging to a University of London colleague who, she says, has returned to the North of England to care for his ageing mother. “We’d already agreed the sublet before this whole thing blew up. This could be the one happy coincidence of the whole affair.”

Roe is a study in contrasts. Like many expat American academics living in London, she dresses more conservatively than her British counterparts, the basic black blazer and skirt better suited to the City than the lecture hall. Her demeanour, however, is anything but corporate or conventional. And although she has adopted certain distinctly British patterns to her speech, her accent remains 100 per cent Meryl Streep, and like many Americans, she prefers to get quickly to the point.

“Look, I’m not saying he _lied_. They’re saying that’s what I wrote, but I don’t think they could have read my book if they honestly believe that. Dr Jekyll’s work on SSRIs, benzodiazepines and the underlying neurochemical mechanisms of their action was a century ahead of its time, easily. I mean, in a way, we’re still catching up and relearning things he already knew. But I don’t understand why the simplest explanation is so hard to fathom: Mr Hyde was not some ‘serum’-produced alternate personality of Dr Jekyll’s. He was Dr Jekyll’s secret male lover.”

What about the “serum” GlaxoSmithKline purports to have perfected? I ask. Surely that is not merely a hoax?

Roe doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh no, I don’t dispute the notion that Dr Jekyll’s theories were sound, or that GSK has developed a compound which actually accomplishes what Dr Jekyll in his attributed writings claims he only ever partially succeeded in doing. What I dispute, rather, is that the personage recorded as Mr Hyde was actually Dr Jekyll under the influence of his own experimental compounds.”

She lays out her theory to me over a shared pot of Darjeeling tea. “Dr Jekyll was fixated upon his own moral hypocrisy. In his own words: ‘I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.’ As we know, Victorian contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde used similar language of duplicity and concealment to describe homosexual desire.

“Now consider,” Roe continues, “how Dr Jekyll characterises his association with Mr Hyde: ‘I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.’ Mr Hyde wasn’t a chemical distillation of Dr Jekyll’s moral failings – ridiculous! He was simply a libidinous, lower-class man who the uptight Dr Jekyll found irresistible in the sack. Doesn’t that just make more _sense_?”

But what of Dr Hastie Lanyon’s contemporaneous eye-witness account of the transformation?

“Delusion. Possibly a tumour on the brain. He was later recorded of dying of metastatic colorectal cancer, which could easily have spread to the brain.” Roe waves her hand dismissively. It sounds eminently plausible to me, but conspiracy theorists have a way of making the ridiculous sound like simple good sense, and I confess I remain sceptical.

“In any case, we can conclude from the lamentable Enfield Affair that Hyde was not ‘pure id’ – excuse my abuse of Freud here. He was well-aware of how he was being perceived and wished to ameliorate that. Otherwise, why get Dr Jekyll to pay the blackmail?” Roe pauses and leans forward with a performance of overeager, unironic earnestness that Americans seem born knowing how to do skilfully. “And if Mr Hyde was a kept homosexual lover when homosexuality was a crime in Britain, is it any surprise the respectable Dr Jekyll would go to the not inconsiderable monetary expense to protect him? Or that he denied being blackmailed when confronted directly about it?”

Roe finishes her theory with the _coup de grace_. “The servants certainly believed that there was more than one person making use of Dr Jekyll’s bed, and I for one am inclined to believe the woman who has to wash the bedsheets,” she says with a wry smirk. “That Mr Hyde was found dead in Dr Jekyll’s clothing only underscores their intimacy. They were sharing a closet – both literally _and_ metaphorically.”

As for what ultimately happened to Jekyll, this is perhaps the least satisfying aspect of Roe’s theory. According to Roe, Jekyll’s increased distress in the weeks leading up to Hyde’s death suggests that they may have been rowing. “Perhaps Dr Jekyll allowed his guilt to consume him and wished to break it off,” she suggests. And indeed, the darkest version of her theory would imply that Hyde murdered Jekyll in an ‘If I can’t have you no one can!’ fit of psychopathic rage. Hardly better is the idea that Jekyll took his own life in despair.

Either way, it was a tragic end for a brilliant man and no less tragic despite likely not being true. Strange, isn’t it, that we’d rather believe one of our most revered thinkers was devoured by his own mind than believe he was undone by an all too ordinary, all too human heart? Roe and I sit in pensive silence at her table for a moment before I rise and thank her kindly for her time.


End file.
